Cert-Kit for Altera Cyclone V

2014-11-19 08:36

Embedded Office, Business, News

Cert-Kit for safety-critical applications with Altera Cyclone V

FPGA technologies play an important role today in the development of functional safety products. Since FPGAs are increasingly replacing electronic components in industrial applications, they must comply with international standards such as IEC 61508. The certification and licensing required for this is however a long, drawn-out process. To simplify and speed up this process, Embedded Office, a specialist company for embedded systems focusing on safety-critical applications, has adapted its µC/OS-MPU Cert-Kit to Altera’s Cyclone V SoCs using the ARM Cortex-A9 processor and moulded this into a starter kit.

Altera can as such, in compliance with the IEC61508 standard, offer a pre-certified RTOS as a solution that features functional safety modules (IP blocks) in FPGA technology.

“By using the real-time kernel µC/OS-MPU as a pre-certified component, the µC/OS-MPU Cert-Kit facilitates the application development and considerably reduces the certification process”, comments Thomas Amann, Managing Director of Embedded Office. “The use of pre-certified components presents clear advantages for companies: They can reduce the development risk, introduce their products faster onto the market, cut costs and focus on their primary areas of expertise. In addition, they have the assurance of a stable platform that has already been certified multiple times.”

“Altera’s Cyclone V SoC family offers integration and unparalleled flexibility in meeting industrial designers requirements”, said David Moore, director of the Industrial business unit, Altera. “The availability of pre-certified µC/OS-MPU complements Altera’s comprehensive Functional Safety solution portfolio and helps our customers reduce their development costs and time to market”.

The Cyclone V family

Altera’s Cyclone V family offers FPGAs with low power consumption, low system costs and optimised performance for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications. The family offers an up to 40% lower total power consumption than the predecessor generation, efficient capabilities for logic integration, integrated transceiver and SoC FPGA versions with an ARM-based hard processor system (HPS). This combination makes them the perfect solution for numerous applications in industrial electronics, communication and automotive electronics.

µC/OS-MPU Cert-Kit

The µC/OS-MPU Cert-Kit comprises all the elements required for creating an executable application. These include the certified source code, various software manuals such as safety, target integration, user, reference and system manual, validation software (including reference board support package) and the TÜV certificate pertaining to the type approval. For safety-critical projects, the pre-certified software component offers an extensive range of operating system services: semaphores, mutual-exclusion semaphores, event flags, message mailboxes, message queues, memory management, task management, SW timer management and a stack monitor. In addition, by means of regulated changes to the configurations, it allows all the services to be adapted to the project requirements and protects the memory areas of processes against write accesses from other processes.

Embedded Office enjoys a long track record in safety expertise. The company, which is certified to DIN EN ISO 9001 standards, already supports numerous safety-critical projects with software components and customised, project-specific advice. Upon request, the test environment can also be made available to customers.

For more information about our Space Protection (µC/OS-MPU) have a look here: Space Protection

For more information about our Cert-Kit please have a look here: Cert-Kit